In this episode of Fresh Art’s Fall 2020 Student Edition, University of Miami student Luz Estrella Cruz makes her way to the Third Horizon Film Festival at the Little Haiti Cultural Complex in Miami. She’s there to meet filmmakers Diana Peralta (De Lo Mio, 2019) and Michael Lees (Uncivilized, 2020), whose work she’s been researching. Interviewing them and watching their films, Cruz discovers the passion behind their stories and immerses herself in two diasporic experiences from the Caribbean.
The Miami-based Third Horizon film festival is dedicated to cultivating awareness of Afro diasporic and Caribbean filmmaking. In February 2020, the fourth edition of Third Horizon took place in the festival’s new home—Miami’s Little Haiti district, with a line-up of urgent new cinema from the Caribbean, its diaspora and beyond.
Diana Peralta’s film De Lo Mio, unfolds in the Dominican Republic, a country that shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. In this intimate family drama, siblings raised in the DR and the U.S. express the complexities of Latinx identity. Adventuring into the wild alone on a vision quest, Michael Lees endures a category 5 hurricane in his film Uncivilized. The Commonwealth of Dominica, a mountainous island in the Lesser Antilles, is the site of his reckoning with self and nature. Both tales reveal the resilient force of family and community.
Luz Estrella Cruz with Diana Peralta 
Diana Peralta, De Lo Mio, still 
Michael Lees, Uncivilized, still 
Uncivilized still, Dominica
Producers: Luz Cruz/Miami Moves Me, Giselle Heraux and Jahné King/FreshArtINTL
Sound Editor: Anamnesis Audio
Related Episodes: Miami Moves Me/Third Horizon, Fresh Art Student Edition, Fresh Voices Miami, Miami’s Caribbean Arts Remix
Related Links: Miami Moves Me Podcast, De Lo Mio, Uncivilized, Third Horizon Film Festival, Fresh Art Distance Learning Guide
Luz Estrella Cruz is a first generation student at the University of Miami, majoring in Africana Studies and film, with a minor in creative writing. Her passion for storytelling has pushed her to amplify and support voices outside the mainstream media. An Afro-Latinx queer woman, she explores the nuances of the African Diaspora through her studies and personal projects. Cruz centers on learning about different cultures and their lived experiences to deepen her understanding of the world she moves in and to share what she discovers on her platform.
Fall 2020 Student Edition
In January 2020, Fresh Art founder Cathy Byrd began to introduce podcasting and South Florida’s cultural landscape to a small group of students at the University of Miami. They explored the city to record and produce their own podcast: Miami Moves Me. At mid-semester, field expeditions came to an abrupt halt and classes went online due to the pandemic. UM podcasters met the challenge—producing eighteen episodes based on their research, field recordings, and interviews. Fresh Art’s Giselle Heraux and Jahné King introduce our Fall 2020 Student Edition, with six stories from the Miami Moves Me archive.
Miami Moves Me creators: Diana Borras, Gretchell Cano, Luz Estrella Cruz, Kurt Gessler, Melissa Huberman, Kristian Kranz, Reese McMichael, Jonathan Raskauskas, Ben Vinarski
[…] Episodes: Diaspora Vibe: Art with Caribbean Roots, Mapping Caribbean Cultural Ecologies, New Caribbean Cinema, Miami’s Caribbean Arts […]